If you were able to attend our chapter meeting on Monday, thank you!  Apologies for the technical problems with Zoom.
Link to a video of Evan's presentation on YouTube is here.
To download a copy of Evan's presentation, click here.  (Check your downloads folder after clicking on the link)

by Bob Luck
If you’d like to skip the President’s Angle and scroll right down to the Cat Fly, let me cut to the chase.  Please attend one or more of the following habitat events scheduled between tomorrow and June 1st:
May 16 and May 19:  Tree planting on Cedar Valley Creek in Southeast Minnesota.  You may remember Jen Biederman talking about this stream during her habitat presentation earlier this year.  A very special place! https://mntu.org/event/plant-trees-with-minnesota-trout-unlimited/
May 21:  Brush removal on Little Pickwick Creek near Winona.  Another beautiful Driftless area stream, where our friends at the WinCres chapter are doing a great job and could use some help. https://mntu.org/event/win-cres-volunteer-workday-little-pickwick-creek-2/
June 1:  Invasive species removal and trash pickup on TCTU’s home stream, the Vermillion.  A bit closer to drive!
We recently submitted our annual activity report to TU National, and here is the bottom line:  in our last fiscal year, over 100 TCTU members donated over 2000 hours of their time.

by Yves Charron

This past April, I went fishing on the Rush with a fellow TCTU member. As we were concluding our day of fishing, he said “I will put on my special fly”. After a few drifts through the rifles, and a couple of nice fish in the net, I asked “what is so special about the fly?” He responded CAT HAIR.

I did return home that day thinking I could give this a try myself since I have 4 cats at home. I took the brush and started to groom my cats. The cats enjoyed it, and I got the material needed to tie some flies. That’s what we call a WIN-WIN!

Finally got a chance to get out and try to fish with the cat flies.   Conditions were not the best, but the cat flies worked!   The tan color flies and the white seems to get more strikes than the gray color. 

I ended up losing my trout flies on the bottom or in the trees….so I guess I will have to go back to square one and groom the cats again!

Give it a try yourself…. maybe you will have a new preferred pattern to fish the trout stream this summer.
​
Tight lines!

by Jim Sauter

Welcome to the 2024 TCTU Streamkeeper monitoring season.  The good news is that our recent April and May showers have been very beneficial to our water levels in area streams.

This year we are transitioning to the Save Our Stream protocol from the Izaak Walton League, and the chemical monitoring season began in April and concludes in late September or early October.  We may also conduct one or more macroinvertebrate surveys in October.